In June 2022, the Supreme Court handed down a decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which dismantled a fundamental right to choose abortion. A line of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1920s recognized unenumerated liberties related to parenting, marriage, and contraception tied to the constitutional right to privacy. Almost half a century ago, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that this constitutional right to privacy was broad enough to encompass the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision reversed Roe and disparaged the right to abortion in the strongest terms: the decision recognizing it was “egregiously wrong” and “on a collision course with the Constitution.”

In 1905, Boston immigration officials detained four Chinese students of the King family, inciting protest from Euro-American elites and sparking an international controversy that gave momentum to the American Boycott movement in Shanghai. A prominent family, the Kings successfully rallied business leaders to take their cause to President Theodore Roosevelt and effectively used the press to articulate Chinese grievances. Bringing to a head the tension between race-based and class-based interpretations of exclusion that troubled the legislation from its inception, the case prompted key reforms in the administration of Chinese exclusion and helped promote a pivot away from the movement for a wholesale “Chinese ban.” An examination of this incident and its role in struggles over immigration law illuminates the conflicted position of Chinese elites—disempowered by race yet empowered by class status—under exclusion. It also provides insights into the agency of Chinese elites in mobilizing resources to combat immigration abuses.

As the televised Watergate hearings captivated the nation during the summer of 1973, they provided innovative programming that stimulated civic activism and taught Congress about the political power of television. Both of these developments ultimately boosted the fortunes of the cable television industry. The Senate hearings, which initiated a dramatic conclusion to a presidency that redefined the place of media in American political life, served to elevate a national conversation about the role of television in politics and to catalyze, across the political spectrum, a reconsideration of the structure of the broadcast network oligopoly. The post-Watergate era provided multiple opportunities to reimagine cable TV as a tool to assert political leadership, encourage civic engagement, and govern the public.

In January 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) moved its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight: it now reads 11:58. The last time the minute hand was this close to the hour of Armageddon was 1953, just after the United States and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear bombs. Since then the stylized clock has ticked backward and forward, each year metaphorically registering civilization's proximity to global catastrophe. “To call the world's nuclear situation dire,” the group warned in its January statement, “is to understate the danger—and its immediacy.”

In 1967, Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kotex, hired women's marketing consultant Estelle Ellis to create and run the corporation's new sex education program. The Life Cycle Center, which opened in 1968, did not produce advertisements, but rather developed sex education curricula for public school classrooms. Its program, the Life Cycle Library, divided women's lives into distinct stages, tethering Kimberly-Clark goods and services to specific junctures of an idealized, heterosexual life. Ellis transformed the “life cycle” into a profitable, enduring marketing concept for Kimberly-Clark. She also extended the Center's influence, rendering it a research and educational authority on women's reproductive health for teachers, social scientists, government actors, and readers. Ellis's career reveals how marketers infiltrated powerful sites of institutional and public health discourse, reshaping them to fit commercial aims and intentions.

In January 1918, Teddy Brown from Fairbanks, Alaska, was coming home. As he entered the house, the ten-year-old boy slammed the door shut, stormed into the living room, and demanded that his parents put on their coats. Teddy solemnly proclaimed that he had heard harrowing stories about French children's sufferings and wanted to contribute a weekly donation of seventy-five cents in order to help “a brother” in France. After listening to his pleas, Teddy's parents eventually came to endorse his chosen mission. The family left the house, venturing out into the sub-zero temperatures, and headed to the local committee of the Fatherless Children of France Society (FCFS). By the time Teddy made his commitment, thousands of other American children had already “adopted” orphans in France.

“The whole world knows that we covet no territory,” announced Herbert Hoover. Or was it Dwight Eisenhower who said that? (“The United States does not covet a single acre of land that belongs to another.”) Or perhaps John F. Kennedy (“This nation does not covet the territory of any people”), Lyndon Johnson (“We threaten no regime and covet no territory”), Gerald Ford (“America covets no one else's land”), or Ronald Reagan (“We Americans covet no foreign territory”)? The disavowing of territorial ambitions is a hallowed, bipartisan presidential tradition, like pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving or hosting the annual Easter egg roll.

When a new strain of influenza circled the globe in the fall and winter of 1918, it swept through the United States at terrifying speed, infecting at least 25 million Americans—roughly one-quarter of the population—over the next two years. Based on any metric, the pandemic was the country's largest mass-mortality episode of the twentieth century, killing approximately 675,000 Americans and surpassing the death toll of World War I. Even as the virus struck the United States with unprecedented ferocity, however, the federal government left most public health decisions to the states, producing a disjointed and hyper-localized approach to a crisis that was national and global in scope. In the absence of a strong federal role, state governments carved out their own policy paths, adopting widely divergent strategies to stem the spread of the disease. This preventive playing field was wildly uneven. Some states were well-equipped with robust public health infrastructures; others lacked the tools to manage the disease's rampant spread.

In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. Thomas S. Adams was one such expert and a key architect of the World War I fiscal state. After the war, Adams envisioned an innovative business tax that could have been the first broad-based, national consumption tax in the United States but was rejected by populist lawmakers. Later, Adams would be identified as one of the intellectual pioneers of the modern value-added tax (VAT)—a tax that has been adopted in nearly every developed country in the world except the United States and has also come to underwrite expansive, progressive social-welfare spending. How did a tax that began with an American expert fail to take hold in the United States? Democratic forces in the shape of organized political and economic interests both facilitated and frustrated the development of seemingly rational tax laws and spending policies crafted by fiscal experts. While Adams learned firsthand how these democratic forces influenced the relationship between expertise and state capacity, this missed opportunity to enact a comprehensive national consumption tax also influenced the peculiar development of the modern American fiscal and social-welfare states.

In 1974, women at the New York Times made national headlines when they filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit. The drama of the court case, however, has overshadowed the formation of the Times Women's Caucus two years prior, in 1972. A focus on the Caucus, the daily labor its members undertook in the years before and after filing suit, and the behind-the-scenes negotiation of internal office politics reveals the years-long process of consciousness raising and workplace organizing required to undertake a lawsuit in this novel legal area. Activist newswomen operated with unique restrictions and necessarily distanced themselves from the feminist movement, while quietly advocating for feminist goals. Caucus members drew from the feminist, labor, and union movements strategically rather than ideologically, and laid the foundation for substantial shifts in women's participation and representation in the mainstream media.

Over the course of the twentieth century, American conceptions of rights became more global. This development—usually described as a move from “civil rights” to “human rights”—was especially acute in American Christian communities. The role of Christianity deserves our attention because of the religion's important role in the conceptualization, popularization, and practice of human rights in the United States and, thanks to Christians’ overseas networks, to every corner of the world.1 The increasingly global understanding of rights, however, did not lead to the liberalization of rights for American Christians. True, human rights talk contributed to important milestones in religious pluralism and the Civil Rights movement, and often served as a gateway to democratic liberalism for some groups resistant to the American liberal tradition. Human rights, however, were not only a liberal project. Conservatives also embraced human rights but in starkly different ways. The divergent interpretations of human rights were not merely a reflection of the growing political divide in the second half of the twentieth century. Christian activists’ adoption of human rights helped forge new alliances and exacerbated the divide between liberal and conservative Christianity, and between political liberalism and political conservatism.

In 1961 families across the United States witnessed the sudden growth of one of the most remarkable consumer products of the Cold War: the home fallout shelter. This article charts the rise of domestic sales for home fallout shelters between 1961 and 1963, the growth in the number of shelter salesmen, the public backlash against their sales techniques, and the eventual decline of the home shelter market. The story of the family fallout shelter exposes the limitations of consumer capitalism in mobilizing and sustaining popular support for national security policy. Questioning the validity of the product being sold and the trustworthiness of the person pitching it, homeowners challenged the citizen-consumer ideal that supposedly went hand-in-hand with the state sanctioned vision of privatized survival.

Management of labor was central to articulating and constructing U.S. colonialism in the southern Philippines. Governed by American military officers for fifteen years (1899–1914), the major island of Mindanao and those of the Sulu Archipelago became sites of intensive race management efforts. Colonial officials identified racialized Muslim and Lumad societies as out of step with the modern world of work and developed myriad programs to address this “problem,” including mandatory service on public works projects, carceral labor, industrial education, and directed markets. Unevenly applied and frequently contested, these initiatives generated a range of responses from local actors. The drive to create disciplined laborers through incentive, coercion, and violence shaped state building in the region and linked it to preoccupations with work and racial reform in other U.S. imperial possessions and the wider colonized world.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, New York City experienced escalating crime alongside residents’ growing frustration with the inability of municipal officials and the police to curtail it. These forces led a range of New Yorkers, from those in low-income neighborhoods to those in business districts, to sidestep the police and reimagine their responses to crime. Increasingly, everyday residents formed neighborhood patrols and hired guards, while businesses and institutions employed private security forces. These developments forged a new role for private actors in the patrolling of city streets. Over time, as resident patrols waned and as security guards proliferated, the private sector gained significant new capacities to surveil and police public space. Additionally, by formalizing a cooperative relationship with private security forces, the New York police and municipal authorities captured these private resources for the expansion of the carceral state.